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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory

(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.

A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.

As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure. 

Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.

This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.

We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)

Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)

The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.

“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart. 

Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948. 

Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”

Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy. 

Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.

Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)

The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived. 

Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”

If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.” 

Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”

For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material. 

Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”

I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known. 

“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”

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The post YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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The BBC Tried to Blame Israel — but Exposed Hezbollah Instead

Men carry Hezbollah flags while riding on two wheelers, at the entrance of Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Lebanon, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

It is well established that Hezbollah has not only turned southern Lebanon into a base for terrorism targeting Israel but also embedded itself deep within Beirut’s civilian suburbs.

Yet when the BBC reports from those same areas, it appears determined to obscure that reality.

That may not be surprising. As HonestReporting previously documented, Hezbollah tightly controls access and information available to foreign journalists. What reporters see — and therefore what international audiences are shown — is often filtered through Hezbollah’s interests.

When a Sky News crew reported from Lebanon earlier this year, journalists openly acknowledged the restrictions imposed on them. Hezbollah limited where they could go and what they could film following Israeli airstrikes, likely to conceal evidence of terrorist activity.

So, when BBC reporters arrive in Lebanon two months later and somehow fail to find evidence of Hezbollah’s presence, it is hardly coincidental.

The “BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon” investigation attempts to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians. But the report itself repeatedly undermines that narrative.

The very case study the BBC highlights gives the game away.

In Beirut’s Hay el Sellom suburb, a BBC journalist interviews Mohammed, whose son Abbas was killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in April 2026.

Mohammed claims that, had he known Hezbollah operatives were nearby, he would have left. But that admission directly undermines the BBC’s broader framing. It reinforces the reality that Israel’s operations are linked to Hezbollah’s presence, not random or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

Another interviewee claims Israel is bombing Lebanon in an attempt to “take over” the country. Yet the report’s own details point to something else entirely: a campaign directed at Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives in an effort to restore security along Israel’s northern border.

According to the IDF, the April 8 strikes that reportedly killed Abbas also targeted more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists.

Ironically, while touring the suburb, the BBC journalist also filmed martyr posters of Ali Mohammed Ghulam Dahini, reportedly killed in the same strikes — corroborating Israeli media reports identifying him as a Hezbollah operative.

Yet the BBC still avoids acknowledging the obvious implication: these strikes were targeting Hezbollah personnel embedded within civilian areas.

Civilian deaths in war are tragic. But tragedy alone does not determine intent.

Under the laws of armed conflict, counterterrorism operations require assessing proportionality — weighing anticipated military advantage against potential civilian harm. In each example highlighted by the BBC, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence at the strike locations is difficult to ignore.

The report itself notes that Mohammed expressed support for Hezbollah in Arabic-language interviews, praising the group for “defending Lebanon.” But Lebanon would not require “defending” from repeated wars had Hezbollah not transformed civilian neighborhoods into military infrastructure.

The BBC acknowledges that Mohammed gave pro-Hezbollah views when speaking to local media. Yet Mohammed presents himself differently to international English-speaking audiences. That discrepancy raises an obvious question: why?

The answer may lie even closer to home.

Investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Mohammed’s son, Abbas Khair al-Din, was himself affiliated with Hezbollah, citing martyr posters and Hezbollah imagery at his grave.

Had the BBC acknowledged these Hezbollah ties, its central framing — that Israel was recklessly targeting civilians — would have become far more difficult to sustain.

This is not the first time the BBC has minimized or erased Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.

By omitting Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure, the outlet constructs a narrative in which responsibility falls almost exclusively on Israel while Hezbollah’s role fades into the background.

Most remarkably, despite the evidence presented throughout the report, the BBC still repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.

The contradiction is striking: the BBC’s own reporting repeatedly points to Hezbollah activity within civilian areas, yet the outlet still amplifies Hezbollah’s denials with minimal scrutiny.

Not all Lebanese civilians support Hezbollah. But the BBC’s inability — or unwillingness — to feature meaningful Lebanese criticism of the terrorist organization reveals how selective the report truly is.

Hezbollah has effectively held Lebanon hostage, exploiting civilians while dragging the country into repeated cycles of conflict.

There is genuine dissent within Lebanon. Many Lebanese are exhausted by Hezbollah’s dominance and want a future free from perpetual war. Yet those voices are almost entirely absent from the BBC’s report.

The BBC intended its report to portray Israel as conducting a campaign against Lebanese civilians.

Instead, it inadvertently documented something else entirely: Hezbollah’s deep entrenchment within civilian infrastructure.

The report repeatedly presents evidence of Hezbollah activity, Hezbollah support, and Hezbollah-linked individuals in the very locations Israel targeted — while simultaneously attempting to deny or downplay the implications.

When media outlets obscure Hezbollah’s use of civilian areas, they do more than distort the story. They sanitize the conditions Hezbollah itself created.

And in this case, the BBC’s own reporting ultimately undermines the narrative it set out to build.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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My artist grandmother nearly made aliyah. I don’t know what she’d think of Israel today

With Mother’s Day coming up, I can’t help but think of my maternal grandmother, who passed away six years ago. And whenever I start thinking about my grandmother, my mind almost always turns to her art.

My grandmother, Kayla Silberberg, had a brief period where she showed her work in art shows in California, selling a few pieces, but most of her paintings from the ‘60s and ‘70s decorate my parents’ house. The majority of her art is multi-colored and not concerned with realism, the objects and figures often disproportionate, the people always bending in ways that implied a lack of a skeletal system. Only a few of her pieces are literal, and it was mostly early work. However, after she’d stopped painting in the ‘70s due to a career change and a reported lack of inspiration, she acquiesced to my mom’s request that she do a realistic sketch of me. (And she even did two!)

I’ve always been particularly fascinated with a painting she did of Israel in 1968. She compressed the country’s geography, the Western Wall practically attached to the Dome of the Rock, separated from a body of water by a handful of small buildings. The water is divided by barbed wire and on the other side, in the piece’s foreground, is a desert landscape, covered by bushes with orange-yellow flowers and multi-colored cacti. There also appears to be a person in the very front, their back turned to the viewer, wearing some type of full-body garment, the tie around their head waving in the back. A similarly shaped figure in what is more clearly a tallit floats near the Western Wall.

My grandmother’s compressed image of Israel from 1968. Image by Kayla Silberberg, courtesy of her familu

When I asked my mom about the barbed wire, she didn’t know what the impetus was for my grandmother to put it there. We’re not certain that our interpretation — that the foreground is Palestinian territory — is accurate. Is there anything to say about how she painted the figures on either side of the barbed wire in very similar shapes? Is the fact that she painted it one year after the Six-Day War relevant to why she painted it?

These weren’t conversations we had with my grandmother when she was alive, and these could very well be modern projections. My fascination with interpreting the work is more a reflection of the historical moment I’m living in than trying to guess what my grandmother would say about Israel today.

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I actually have almost no memories of talking to my grandmother about Israel, with the exception of the story of her and my grandfather’s near attempt to immigrate there sometime in the 1960s. (The story goes that when the immigration office told my grandfather, who held a computer-engineering degree, that Israel already had too many engineers, my grandfather was so insulted that he abandoned the plan.)

It wasn’t that my grandmother was apolitical — one of her paintings is titled “Feminism,” a cryptic collage of male and female faces emerging from a colorful cloud. And no one could ever say she lacked strong opinions. It was just one of those conversations we never got around to.

I was 17 when my grandmother died, just on the cusp of being interested in talking about world events with the adults in my life. I imagine that just a couple years later, I would’ve developed more of a consciousness for talking about heavier topics.

That feeling has grown stronger since I moved to New York almost two years ago. My grandmother grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a duplex that had her immediate family on top and her grandparents on bottom. The only real story I have of this time in her life is that she used to tell her Orthodox parents she was going to be with her aunt on Shabbat nights, when actually she was sneaking out to go on dates with boys. When I visited Coney Island for the first time last summer, I wondered if she’d often come there herself, and tried to imagine what it would have been like in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

While talking about this story with my mom, she assured me that I was not alone in this. Her grandmother Chaia was 14-years-old when she immigrated to New York from the Pale of Settlement — the area that the Russian government restricted Jews to — in the early 1900s. My mom told me she never asked Chaia about her experiences before and during her immigration.

It’s not just my grandmother I wish I’d been able to have a relationship with as an adult. There’s also my paternal grandfather, who died when I was 14. I think about the conversations I could’ve had with my cousin Reverend Dr. Katie G. Cannon, the first Black woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church of the United States, if she’d lived just two more years, after I took my first sociology and religious studies classes. What would I have spoken about with my grandmother, who had a later career as a college guidance counselor, if she had lived to see me go to Penn? Or if she had been around for my start at the Forward, which she read every week while it was in print?

I’ve previously written about the project I worked on with my parents, where I recorded conversations with them about all the objects in our home (minus the modern appliances). Through that, I got answers to questions I would’ve never thought to ask about my parents’ lives and had many conversations about my grandmother’s art. But these were mostly surface level observations. And none were about the Israel painting, which ironically had to be moved to storage to make room for my grandmother’s other belongings after she died.

Although I wish I’d had the idea for the project while all four of my grandparents were still alive, I still have the chance to ask my paternal grandmother questions about her life — and his own — that I haven’t thought to ask before. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what made Kayla paint Israel the way she did. The fact that her paintings bring up so many emotions and questions for me tells me that she still lives on within my heart.

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Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz Says Mamdani’s Wife Snubbed Her Because She’s From Jewish State

Melanie Shiraz being crowned Miss Israel 2025. Photo: Simon Soong | Edgar Entertainment

Melanie Shiraz, who represented Israel in the 2025 Miss Universe pageant, said on Wednesday that the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to take a photograph with her because the beauty queen is from the Jewish state.

Shiraz posted on Instagram a video that features a short clip of herself with Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City. The Israel native said in the video’s voice-over that she met Mamdani’s wife by chance in a coffee shop in New York City and the two sat next to each other. Duwaji was willing to take a photo with the beauty queen “until she found out that I was Miss Israel; until I told her that as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online,” Shiraz said.

“I told her as part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which not one side is constantly dehumanized. But despite that, despite the setting being calm, the moment she found out I was Israeli, she refused to have a conversation with me,” continued the graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

“If you can publicly apologize for dehumanizing Israelis, but you can’t get yourself to humanize one when you come face-to-face with them in real life, what does that say about you and what does that say about the state of our politics considering that is the wife of the mayor of New York City?” Shiraz added.

A Texas-born illustrator with Syrian roots, Duwaji has previously uploaded or “liked” numerous anti-Israel posts on social media. She has also “liked” several online posts that celebrated the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and even defended the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, describing it as Palestinian “resistance.”

It was discovered that Duwaji shared social media posts praising female Palestinian terrorists who participated in plane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015, she shared a post in which someone else wrote that Tel Aviv was occupying Palestinian land and “shouldn’t exist.” Duwaji also illustrated an essay co-edited by a Palestinian-American activist author who described the Oct. 7 attack as “spectacular” and called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls.”

In April, Duwaji apologized for “harmful” social media posts she made as a teenager, which included anti-gay and anti-Black language, but did not directly address her more recent anti-Israel social media activity.

Mamdani, who has faced his own share of criticism for anti-Israel comments and actions, has previously defended his wife by saying she is a “private person.”

In the caption of her Instagram video, Shiraz said she was “not particularly” surprised by her interaction with Duwaji at the coffee shop in New York City.

“It is easy to apologize without meaningfully changing one’s behavior,” Shiraz explained. “It is easy to claim opposition to dehumanization in principle, but far more difficult to embody that in practice. She was polite throughout. But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so.”

“I approached the interaction with openness to a genuine, respectful conversation. That openness was not reciprocated,” Shiraz added. “And that, perhaps, is the more telling point: how often this disconnect appears, and how normalized it has become.”

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